Uncharted 3 director Justin Richmond has said developer Naughty Dog would need to separate the game’s offline portion if it didn’t come with an online pass.

Speaking to TSA, Richmond said Uncharted would have to exist as two separate products – one offline and one online – without it.

Richmond said PSN Pass needs to be part of the package “or we offer online completely in its entirety,” adding that a lack of online fee for used game buyers would result in a “complete offline package as well, so if you want to play the co-op with a friend, you can do that offline.”

Online passes have become increasingly prevalent in mainstream games since EA first adopted the Project Ten Dollar system in 2010, forcing buyers of secondhand games to pay a fee to access online play.

Richmond further justified Uncharted 3’s online pass with the much-used reason of supporting server costs for used games.

“We give literally thousands of hours of content in our online stuff, and on top of that we give you not just competitive, but an entire co-op experience as well,” he said.

“There’s basically a whole alternate history, alternate version story in our co-op, and in this game they’re actually all tied together. All the co-op missions, of which there are even more, are all actually one continuous story, if you play them in the right order.

“We’re giving out a huge amount of content, and part of the reason for the online pass is that when that stuff goes online, it isn’t free. We have to pay for servers and all this different stuff to maintain it, and so at some point games have to make money. It’s a business, and we just want to be able to continue to provide that kind of content.”

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception launches on November 1 in the US and November 2 in the UK for PS3.